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I bought myself a copy of Daniel Leader's "Local Breads" just before Christmas. It's a very good read for one thing - lots of stories about his travels to different parts of Europe, learning the secrets of many traditional regional breads from France, Italy, Poland, Germany, etc. There are lots of techniques to try and recipes scaled for the home baker.

Just posting to catalog photos and thoughts as my baking progresses.

This first batch:

-Outer crumb was light and airy, but when I cut into the middle of the loaf, it was much more dense.

-I got impatient during the final rise and was feeling antsy, so I baked after only 2.5 hours.

-I still felt pure joy when I took the steam lid off and saw that my all day project had been successful!

During my childhood, we kids used to gather acorns and chestnuts (not the edible kind) to make funny little gnomes from them. Nice and shiny as they looked, I knew that only pigs and squirrels could eat them, they were much too bitter for human consumption.

When I read a facebook post ("Bread History & Practice") about the possibility to use acorns in bread baking, I was intrigued - the huge European oaks in our neighborhood had produced a bumper crop of acorns this year.

I have been working on a small machine for a while. Each day it gets smarter and smarter, more powerful and more refined. Although not perfect, I think I can say with the utmost humble expression,  I think this may be the first program to prescreen baking recipes. So what!?

The idea is to have a downloadable Recipe Report Card you supply with your recipe, so people know how a recipe will actually turn out, instead of the just looking at the best of 30 staged photos.

This means:

I asked my wife to buy me a few bannetons for Hanuka and she bought me enough to start a bakery :).

The first one I used was a square shape.  I at first was going to use the square one and a batard shape but after dividing the dough realized I needed to use all of it to fill the square version.  After combining the two dough's together I probably degassed them a little too much which resulted in a tighter crumb than expected.

I tried to recreate this nearly 100% rye bread according to the well known German bread blogger "brotdoc".

For a description, see here: https://brotdoc.com/?s=Poal

You can use the English translation of the website.

I modified the method somewhat, didn't use a machine to knead the bread, didn't have fresh yeast, and used a cloche to bake it. It turned out alright. The crumb is pretty dense and a day after baking is still very moist. It is close to the German tradition, however, as I remember it.

Tom

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